CNN –
Thousands of Reddit forums it’s getting dark On Monday, one of the largest user-driven protests to ever take place on the social media platform erupted.
The voluntary bans, which prevent groups’ content from being publicly viewable, affect Reddit’s largest online communities, including popular groups devoted to music, history, sports, and video games. More than two dozen subreddits with at least 10 million subscribers, as well as thousands of smaller networks, are taking part in the protests.
Monday’s protests reflect widespread outrage at Reddit’s plan to charge millions of dollars for some Third-party apps can still access the platform. The plan has already forced several of Reddit’s top app makers to announce their closures because they can’t afford the new costs, which are set to begin as early as next month.
The standoff between Reddit executives and its users and developers marks a turning point for the platform, which is reportedly set to go public later this year. For years, third-party apps have allowed Reddit users to browse posts, write comments, and share images and videos on Reddit.
However, now Reddit is demanding heavy payments from app makers to maintain the same level of access through its application programming interface (API), apparently aiming at better monetization of Reddit users. Last week, Christian Selig, developer of the popular Apollo app, said Reddit plans to charge him $20 million a year to keep his app running. He later said he had no choice but to close the app.
Reddit further exacerbated tensions with some members of its developer community by apparently misrepresenting the details of his private conversation with Selig to make it appear he was blackmailing the company. However, Selig recorded his phone call with the company, a fact confirmed by Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman later confirmed in a question and answer session with users.
Selig’s app is just a victim of the coming changes. Reddit critics say the platform’s high fees will wipe out any third-party competition against Reddit’s proprietary app, which many users have derided as slow, buggy, and inferior. They also fear the moves will decimate a volunteer community that relies on third-party tools to do the important work of Reddit forum moderation — a responsibility that unlike other big companies Reddit delegates to the site’s users and not to its own paid employees or contractors social networks.
Reddit’s defenders, including some users, said it is Reddit’s right to set its own prices for API access and that it is a company that has the right to control how users access the data access the platform provided by him. Some users said they didn’t even know it was possible to access Reddit through third-party apps.
“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to make that happen we can no longer subsidize commercial businesses that require large-scale data usage,” Huffman wrote in a question-and-answer session with users on Friday.
The fight echoes how Twitter, under its new owner Elon Musk, recently announced its own paywall for data to generate new revenue streams and shore up the company’s struggling finances. Twitter’s move sparked an outcry from third-party app makers, misinformation researchers and public sector account holders, who said the move would hurt transparency and accessibility. Twitter has responded to the criticism by adding a new tier to its paid plan, but the move was immediately criticized as “too little, too late.”
Now Reddit is facing a similar revolt, which could prove even more effective given its greater reliance on community members for basic site upkeep.
The use of combat isn’t just limited to Reddit. It comes against the backdrop of a broader debate about who creates the value on social media and who gets to reap the rewards. And it reflects years of growing public skepticism about big tech platforms that have become economically dominant by collecting and using vast amounts of other people’s personal data.
For Reddit and its future shareholders, the company’s value comes from the infrastructure the site provides for conversations. Operating this infrastructure, protecting the data stored there, and charging for access to this proprietary data creates value that Reddit believes should be retained.
For the developers and moderators of Reddit, however, the value of the platform comes not only from the company’s operation of the platform, but also from the user-led moderation of the site’s myriad forums, as well as the various tools and features that others use to create Reddit developed more usable – for example for the blind and visually impaired. These solutions may not have been developed by Reddit itself, but the company benefited from them as they helped the site grow and reach a wider audience.
Unlike Instagram or YouTube, Reddit owes its rise to the volunteer work of many of its users, who borne the cost of developing features the company didn’t want to invest in. In this regard, Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia’s crowdsourced digital encyclopedia, whose volunteer editors are considered an important resource.
Meanwhile, however, many users feel cheated.
“If they start charging for API calls, [moderators] “They should charge Reddit for the time they spend keeping the site up and running,” wrote one user. “This site ONLY works thanks to the free work of mods.”
Some have vowed to stop using Reddit, while others have suggested they might even delete their entire account so the company can’t monetize what it has done so far.
“For many Apollos users, their existence is the only reason we still use the platform,” wrote another user. “I’ve been here for more than 15 years, but I have no intention of staying when it gets dark at Apollo.”